There’s no way back believe me/
I’m writing you from there.

~Jorie Graham

I’ve been using you. I’ll fess up. I’ll play it as it lays. I’ve used you to feel significant again, to shine brighter than my own flat self. A penny no matter how tarnished gleams after time on the train track. A balloon is no fun without air. But now I feel myself slipping, just one last grain of sand slipping down the slick funnel, just one skyscraper lost in a horizon of metal and glass. Once the Chrysler Building was the shit, you know, the bees’ knees. Once it held significance. Now it is a hobby horse I still ride, a strawman I’ll argue as if I could win, if only I knew what I was arguing for. I feel small, there I’ve said it. I am dwarfed by the looming statues of twin monoliths: cancer and disability. I hate to say it but maybe I am Fitzgerald’s goddamn boat. (How many of the faint-hearted have claimed the same?) I am buffeted, and the green light, well I’m rowing against more than the current, more than the wind. I am rowing against anonymity. I heard love ride the air like an echo, and I chased it. I cupped it like water in my palm. Dare I say I am the rainbow that needs more than to be the treasure itself? I thought to have love was to be something at a time when I was nothing more than a plate for food, a table for the plate, the floor for the table, the earth for the floor. Settle it all upon me and I won’t shift, won’t tire. But take me for granted and I’ll forget I’m here. I’ll forget that maybe I was supposed to be dessert, if only someone had thought to take a bite. Still I will be sweet. I can hardly complain. There’s no telling what else could go wrong if I so much as make a peep. I am both the girl and the closet. The baby and the blanket. I am absence. I am the dark. And maybe it’s enough to be a thought, a star long extinguished and glinting only as memory. Careful. If you blink, I might miss me.

You’ve gone quiet again, and I can hear
the neighbor’s dog barking and the rattle

of her old car’s tailpipe when she starts
it up and pulls away. The bank of windows

in the bedroom we no longer share lets in
much more sound than light. The thick leaves

of the big maple that leans over our roof
shades the heat, but does nothing for the noise.

Still your silence has me eavesdropping,
ear to the floorboards, for the slightest sound,

the whisper of your feet in thick socks,
the knock of your knuckle on the doorjamb,

the click of my doorknob turned. I listen
for some sign you are still here, maybe just

the clearing of your throat, maybe just
the whisper of the wind bending the blades

of grass you can no longer cut. Someone shouts
to her child, someone else starts his mower,

but now I hear the sluicing swirl of my blood,
the bulging beat of my heart behind my eyes.

Your has silence carved a space I begin to fill with
new sound. My desire a trumpet, my sadness a song.